Database Lead Jobs in California (NOW HIRING)

This role follows a hybrid schedule, with three days per week onsite in our Culver City or San Francisco office.

The opportunity

Altruist is in the midst of an exceptional growth phase, and we are hiring a Staff Database Administrator to join our Cloud Infrastructure & Platform team. Our clearing and brokerage platform runs on a multi-terabyte Aurora PostgreSQL estate that is the system of record for hundreds of thousands of brokerage accounts, millions of positions, and hundreds of thousands of trades every day.

This role owns the reliability, performance, and resilience of that estate through its next order of magnitude. You will lead our multi-region disaster recovery program for data stores, break critical domains out of shared clusters into dedicated ones, and re-architect our replication and data movement layer so it keeps up as volumes multiply. You will be one of two staff-level database engineers, working directly with engineering leadership and partnering with platform, data, security, and product teams. The role carries a lot of autonomy for design and implementation, and real influence over where our data architecture goes next.

Your impact

• Own the production PostgreSQL estate end to end - multi-terabyte Aurora clusters across clearing, broker-dealer, and internal platform workloads - including capacity, performance, availability, and cost.
• Lead multi-region resilience for data stores: convert production clusters to Aurora Global Database, instrument replication lag against tiered RTO and RPO commitments, and own documented failover, failback, and recurring recovery drills.
• Drive database segmentation. Carve our most critical domains out of shared clusters into dedicated ones with their own read paths, so failover, upgrades, and blast radius are scoped per domain rather than per fleet.
• Architect for an order-of-magnitude increase in accounts, positions, and daily transaction volume: capacity modeling, tenant-aware partitioning and sharding strategy, per-domain read replicas, continuous aggregates and materialized views, connection pooling, and load testing ahead of demand.
• Own the upgrade program. Plan and execute major-version upgrades across the fleet with minimal downtime, and keep engine versions current enough that they never gate replication or recovery capability.
• Own change data capture and data movement - Debezium, Kafka/MSK, and AWS DMS - for throughput, lag, and correctness, including re-architecting single-threaded vendor replication paths into parallel, partitioned pipelines.
• Raise the bar on schema-change governance: review standards for migrations, index and locking review, and automated guardrails so unsafe changes are caught before they reach production rather than during market hours.
• Partner with security and compliance on encryption, row-level security, least-privilege access, and the evidence our SOC 1 and regulatory obligations depend on.
• Be a senior escalation point for database-driven incidents, and turn each one into a durable fix, a runbook, or an alert rather than a repeat.
• Build automation and AI-assisted tooling that makes routine database work self-serve for product engineers, and mentor engineers across the org on data modeling, query design, and operating databases at scale.

What you bring

• Experience - 8+ years operating production relational databases at scale, ideally at a B2B financial services, fintech, or SaaS organization handling regulated or transactional data.
• Deep PostgreSQL expertise: query planning and optimization, indexing, partitioning, vacuum and bloat management, locking and concurrency, replication, and connection management.
• Hands-on experience running Aurora or RDS at multi-terabyte scale, including major-version upgrades, blue/green cutovers, and parameter and storage tuning.
• Proven multi-region disaster recovery design: defining and defending RTO and RPO targets, cross-region replication, promotion and failback mechanics, and validated backup and restore.
• Practical experience with change data capture and data movement - Debezium, Kafka, or AWS DMS - and with diagnosing replication lag and correctness issues.
• Comfort working as code: Terraform, CI/CD pipelines, Kubernetes, and version-controlled schema migration tooling such as Flyway or Liquibase.
• Strong observability instincts - you reach for pg_stat_statements, wait events, and dashboards before you reach for a guess.
• Education - Ideally a B.A. / B.S. in a relevant field such as Computer Science or a related discipline, but experience and understanding matter just as much.
• Staff-level scope - You set technical direction beyond your own work, lead multi-quarter programs across teams, and influence without needing authority to do it.
• Ownership - The pride you put into every aspect of your work is unparalleled and undeniable.
• Superb communication - Intentional dialogue is a superpower. You listen as well as you share your perspective with others.
• Resilience - We are inspired by your unwavering determination to achieve success, no matter the adversity you face along the way.
• Assurance - Your confidence is brilliant, yet ego-less. You possess a strong knowledge base, the ability to discover the unknown, and are open to differing perspectives.
• Creative problem solving - Identifying the problem is simply not enough. You are instinctually creative in your approach to finding solutions to roadblocks.

Bonus points

• Expertise with AI (Claude) best practices, and an interest in building agentic automation for database operations.
• Experience splitting a monolithic database into domain-owned clusters, or introducing sharding to a multi-tenant system already in production.
• MySQL, Snowflake, ElastiCache/Redis, or OpenSearch operational experience alongside PostgreSQL.
• Kafka or Amazon MSK operations, including connector fleets and upgrade planning.
• Experience supporting a large-scale data migration or platform integration, including historic data conversion into a canonical model.
• Familiarity with SOC 1, SOC 2, or similar audited control environments.
• Knowledge of brokerage, clearing, or custody platforms and the financial services industry.